Chapter 2

Anything Worth Doing Is Not Necessarily

Worth Doing Well

I n the first chapter, we stressed the role cost plays in guiding human behavior. In
this chapter, we offer specific examples of the influence of cost. We seek to
show you how economic analysis can help us develop surprising conclusions about
the way people behave.

Anything Worth Doing

From early childhood, most of us have been taught that anything worth doing is
worth doing well. If we were asked today if we still agree with the statement, many
of us would say that we do.1 It is only natural for a person to prefer a job that has
been done well to one that has been done not so well. Indeed, such a preference for
quality is fully consistent with the basic assumption in economics that more is
preferred to less. It is also easy to see why people may not like to redo something
they have already done, particularly if the combined time involved is greater than
the time that would have been required to do it right in the first place.
Obviously, people do not behave the way they profess they should. There is
probably not a minister around who has not written what he considered at the time
to be a poor sermon, and one of the authors recently built a bookcase that was more
or less thrown together. Wives and husbands have cooked dinners they knew in
their hearts were seriously deficient in one respect or another. Students regularly
choose to work for a grade of C (or a grade point average far less than 4.0) instead of
going all out for an A, even when they prefer to get an A. How many, do you
suppose, of the students who are reading this have written a paper that by their own
standards fell far short of a well-done paper, and how many of them have sat
through lectures for which the professor was ill-prepared? In fact, can you say at
this point that you have read the last few pages well?
Admittedly, people do some things well, but the point we wish to emphasize is
that they frequently do things less than well, not because they do not want to do
better, but because of the additional (or marginal) cost involved in improving the

R.B. McKenzie and G. Tullock, The New World of Economics, 25

DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-27364-3_2, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012